Composing a Life

and the rest of the biosphere.

SEVEN
MAKING AND KEEPING

    Y OU KEEP A HOUSE , but you make a home. The word “home” has many layers of meaning. The distinction in English between house and home, even though it is abused by real-estate brokers, is one of our great riches.
    The five women in this book have all been homemakers, but none of us keeps house in order to define who we are. Still, we have all been responsible for seeing that, one way or another, the chores got done, though not necessarily promptly or well. As I have puzzled over the ways in which men and women compose their lives, I have come to think of homes as joint compositions, frameworks of complementarity composed by difference within which growth is possible. This concept can be expanded to include schools and neighborhoods, the workplace and the biosphere. Once we accept this redefinition, we can turn the metaphor around and look afresh at our ideas of family residences for rest and work and play. We are creating and sustaining our homes in new ways, forging new links between the abstraction of “home” and its material tokens. As we free the ideas of home and homemaking from their links to old gender roles, we can now also draw on metaphors of home to enrich our perceptions of the world.
    Ellen and Steve bought their house in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston, before the explosion of real-estate prices and interest rates. It’s a big old house that allows them to put up players who come to town for tournaments at the nearby Longwood Tennis Club, and could not contrast more sharply with the poverty and homelessness Ellen deals with every day. It seems to cry out for a tribe, and Ellen and Steve, who both grew up in big families, have kept it populated with family on long visits, friends, students, and large golden retrievers. In effect, their impulses have repeatedly moved them away from the image of home as a private base from which to go out. Instead, this is home as an incubator, a place where growth is fostered and relationships reaffirmed. The work involved is shared, while both of them go out to professional activity that involves caring for others, fostering relationships, and promoting growth.
    The homes we create for ourselves are far more than physical shelters; the homeless lack far more than homes. In her efforts to improve the care of the homeless, Ellen emphasizes that being homeless means a breakdown of social ties and supports of all kinds. Rooms and apartments are desperately needed not only because they provide shelter but because they foster human relationships within and around them. Those who lack the skills to sustain such relationships need a whole range of supports, including mental and physical health care.
    When Ellen and Steve were residents, they shared an apartment without any clear commitment. Getting their first dog, Rusty, established their partnership as a long-term relationship and the space they lived in as a home. The dogs they have today, Obie and Suzie, are both demanding. Obie is a pushy old man who paws insistently or shoves his graying muzzle onto your lap; Suzie is an insecure and needy young female who was kept alone in an outdoor kennel for the first few years of her life and has never completely learned to trust the good fortune that brought her into warmth and companionship. Obie can be shut in the kitchen or the yard when his demands become exasperating, but Suzie stays with Ellen all day when she is working at home, clinging to the comfort of her presence and refusing to eat when she is away.
    The household is a choreography of large and small mammals, pursuing their own cross-purposes. Steve and Ellen have experimented with different kinds of childcare workers, incorporating them into family life, but even so they find themselves recruiting every eight months or so, building a new set of rhythms, even as their children are growing and exploring. Danny, the oldest, is bright-eyed and exploratory, demanding attention as he assembles and disassembles his toys, while Sarah has been a calm and smiling baby. Throughout it all, golden retrievers flow across the human current, nudging and leaning. Steve does most of the cooking in this family, and there are also regular trips for Chinese and gourmet take-out. The impulse to domesticity expressed by this large warm house has somehow escaped the temptation of perennial elaborate meals. There is an elegant dining room with grass-papered walls, tall draped